Teaching tip: Video Everywhere

October 7, 2013

Video Everywhere, a feature added to Blackboard, allows faculty, and students, to add personalized video clips to any area in Blackboard that has an editing menu; including the discussion forum, blogs, journals, wikis for students, and all content areas and gradebook feedback for instructors. Sometimes using video is just a better way to say what you mean to make sure the correct emphasis is given to the right words. Find out about this new feature in this week’s teaching tip at http://elearning.uaf.edu/go/tt-video-everywhere.

From Gimmick to Gestalt: The Resurrection of the Animated GIF from 1-2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11 in the Wood Center Pub. Christen Bouffard presents. You’ve seen them before, dancing babies and bananas silently invading your inbox, tucked within the signatures of emails. They are animated GIFs and they have dutifully served as jesters of web media for nearly two decades. Those of us who remember back that far can’t help but roll our eyes at their misuse. Fast forward to today and you will find that the animated GIF is enjoying a refined renaissance as journalists, artists, and the content-creating public push the GIF format far beyond its conventional boundaries. Let’s take a look at how the short, looping canvas of the GIF has grown up to support satire, creative expression, and storytelling. Have you tried creating your own? Is it something for your class?

A Talk on Storytelling: Join Alan Levine at the Bear Gallery at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11, for a talk on storytelling. Storyteller, photographer, blogger, educator, Alan will deliver a talk on storytelling for the greater community. If storytelling, visual and otherwise, online and otherwise, interests you, then this is a presenter you do not want to miss! Alan is recognized for expertise in the application of new technologies to education. A pioneer on the web in the 1990s and an early proponent of blogs and RSS, he shares his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog. Among his recent interests are new forms of web storytelling (including 50+ Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story, pechaflickr, and the StoryBox), as well as leading and teaching the open digital storytelling class, ds106.